opinion
Tom Stoppard Reveals His
Jewish Self in ‘Leopoldstadt’
BY THANE ROSENBAUM
T here is no small amount of irony in Tom
Stoppard’s latest play, “Leopoldstadt,”
dazzling audiences on Broadway at the same
time as America’s streets are convulsing with
antisemitic mayhem.

After all, Stoppard, one of the world’s finest
dramatists, has for the entirety of his career been
a closeted Jew. And not just any Jew, but one of
the fortunate ones who, as a small boy, actually
survived the Holocaust.

Stoppard was born in Czechoslovakia as Tomáš
Sträussler. His family managed to escape the
encircling Nazis, although his father was eventually
killed. His mother would marry a British, non-Jew-
ish military officer in India, who brought his new
family to England. That’s when Tomáš became Tom
and adopted his stepfather’s surname.

Stoppard mastered the language of his new
country and wrote widely and wittily about
weighty themes in a career that landed him on the
short list of England’s theatrical royalty. He would
eventually be knighted. Not bad for someone
whose childhood was darkened by the monstrous
events that resulted in the murder of two-thirds of
European Jewry.

“Leopoldstadt” is a fictional account of what
happened to Stoppard’s entire Jewish family.

Most were killed in death camps.

After a long and distinguished career writ-
ing award-winning plays and screenplays, none
of which revealed any tribal connection to the
ancient Hebrews, Stoppard arrived at a point
where he would train his considerable dramatic
gifts on exploring the buried story that, psycho-
logically, might have shaped him most. All that
British schooling and literary fame had left some-
thing very precious unsaid and undone.

And it arrives at a propitious moment on America’s
finest stage. “Leopoldstadt” should be required
viewing for Kanye West, Kyrie Irving and the woke
mobs who had never heard of Kristallnacht and
who believe that Jews, throughout the ages, have
led charmed, white-privileged lives. Their igno-
rance, or plain antisemitism, is astounding. Jews
involved in the slave trade? When did they have
time for that, folded in between the expulsions,
Inquisitions, pogroms and genocide?
With this new wave of antisemitism becoming so
fashionably mainstream and unapologetically vis-
ible, far too many have forgotten that Jews were
always first among equals in deserving the spe-
cial protection of minority status. “Leopoldstadt”
“Leopoldstadt” is both a
metaphor and object
lesson for Jews.

is an astonishing tutorial on how deceptive per-
ceived privilege can be.

The play unfolds over half a century. The Jewish
family at the center of the story plunges from
lavishly wealthy, cultured, cosmopolitan Jews to
a decimated family tree stump. All that’s left are
three scattered cousins and fractured memories.

Stoppard sets the play in Vienna so as to allow the
adults in the opening scene to boast of how much
influence Jews have had on Austrian culture, and
how successfully Jews have assimilated and have
been embraced by Austrian society. Indeed, the cur-
tain opens to a massive Christmas tree that upstages
the large cast of Jewish parents and children.

Twice characters say: “We Jews worship cul-
ture.” They see it as an inoculant. Obviously, they
have never heard of today’s cancel culture.

Another thematic reason for Austria as set piece
is that a fellow Austrian Jew Theodor Herzl had
just written a book about how the Jews of Europe
should leave and start their own country. What
a laughable idea, they think. Another Jew from
Vienna, Dr. Sigmund Freud, is introducing a new
field of medicine — one of the mind — once more
demonstrating to the world the intellectual agility
of the Jewish people. What would Austrian soci-
ety do without its Jews? Apparently, the mayor of
Vienna is a major Jew-hater, but, honestly, what
does that have to do with them?
Later in the play, one of those same characters
confesses, “All that culture did not save us from
barbarism.” “Leopoldstadt” is both a metaphor and object
lesson for Jews who deceive themselves into
believing that once they graduate from the lowly
streets of ghettos, they will be forever welcome in
high society.

For the poignant reminder of this mispercep-
tion, Stoppard should be congratulated yet again.

After all, he is not alone among Jewish-British
playwrights who Anglicized their names and stra-
tegically left any trace of their secret identities out
of their dramas. Toward the end of “Leopoldstadt,”
the character who represents Stoppard himself as
a young writer remarks on his Jewishness as noth-
ing more than “an ironic fact.”
There are many such writers in England. British
stages have hosted scores of plays by Jewish
dramatists who never came close to making
such an admission: Harold Pinter (in the first draft
of “The Homecoming,” the family was Jewish),
Peter Shaffer, Alfred Sutro, Arnold Wesker,
Ronald Harwood (“Taking Sides,” an exception),
Peter Barnes and Patrick Marber (who directed
“Leopoldstadt,” and has written one Jewish play,
titled, “Howard Katz”). Together they comprise a
canon of Jew-less storytelling.

The British are known for having a stiff upper lip.

British Jews, apparently, go one step farther: keep-
ing their entire mouths shut. Perhaps it’s because
Jews were officially expelled from England in the
13th century, which left a legacy of provisional resi-
dency — gentle manners always expected, Queen
and country first, bags always packed, just in case.

It was the rare British Jew for whom Jewishness
was part of the mystique. Victorian Prime Minister
Benjamin Disraeli converted to Christianity.

Mendoza the Jew, who boxed in the late 18th
century, was perhaps the first professional ath-
lete to market his name — and nickname. Harold
Abrahams, the world’s fastest man during the
1924 Olympic Games, despite his Cambridge ped-
igree, never outran the prejudice that drove him.

Until now, in what may become his last play,
Stoppard never dwelled on his past. The scope of
his loss and degree of Jewish ties took decades
to materialize as art. All along the tragedy of his
parents and many uncles, aunts and cousins was
rich with dramatic possibility and catharsis. Even
England could not contain such emotion.

And it has arrived at the right time — for
Stoppard, and for Jews living in a world eerily
reminiscent of those foreboding days when actual
Leopoldstadts provided no shelter from dark
clouds and hard rain.

Despite his longtime association with
Shakespeare (his first play was a retelling of
“Hamlet”; his screenplay for “Shakespeare in
Love” received an Oscar), Stoppard’s backstory,
and the dissolution of his family, proved to be the
real thing. JE
Thane Rosenbaum is a novelist, essayist, law
professor and distinguished university professor
at Touro University, where he directs the Forum
on Life, Culture & Society. He is the legal analyst
for CBS News Radio. His most recent book is titled
“Saving Free Speech … From Itself.” This article
was first published by the Jewish Journal.

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